Articles
Book Review

Imperial Israel and the Palestinians: The Politics of Expansion
by Nur Masalha
(Pluto Press, 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, Virginia 20166-3012 USA) 2000.

Review by Clare Brandabur

In spite of its unassuming title, this book contains the secret we have all been looking for: the real reason why the Bush administration is hell-bent on invading Iraq. We had it partly right: the oil companies want Iraqi oil because it is so close to the surface and therefore so cheap to extract. And we knew that Ariel Sharon was likely to use the war as an occasion to 'transfer' the Palestinians across the Jordan.

But the documents of Israeli right-wing expansionist 'Whole Land of Israel Movement' quoted so carefully and precisely in Nur Masalha's book hit this reader like a splash of cold water: Of course! The war is being engineered IN ORDER to 'transfer' the Palestinians to give Israel more lebensraum. Bush is in the ideological clutches of the Christian Zionists and the Jewish Zionists, an unlikely alliance since the Christians hope to convert the Jews to lure the Messiah back.

But there is more to the 'transfer' than that. It is not just to Jordan that the Palestinians are to be transported, but also to Iraq and Syria! This may also give us the clue to why the hawks around George W. Bush have been mentioning Syria as another possible target, in spite of their having dutifully signed the UN Resolution mandating 'drastic measures.'
To provide only this cursory overview would be to understate and undervalue the careful documentation which goes to make Nur MasalhaWs work so persuasive, but I want to give only a few quotations so that every one will go out and find this book:

According to Masalha, Dr. Irving Moskowitz, a Miami-based American Jewish millionaire, who is currently financing the construction of a new Jewish neighborhood being built on Arab land in Ras al-'Amud in Arab East Jerusalem, wrote as follows in February 1990: 'A Pro-Israeli source in the American Congress leaked lately to the Jewish lobby people that American officials are secretly discussing a new approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict. According to this approach population transfer should be carried out between Israel and its Arab neighbors.' According to Moskowitz, 'only one sole option has been left to American policy-makers: to come up with a completely new approach.' This so-called new approach is euphemistically termed by Moskowitz as 'population exchange.' The Moskowitz quotation goes on to envision the relocation of the refugees from 'Judea and Samaria' in Jordan as well as Syria and Iraq.' (pp. 182-183)

Masalha quotes Meir Lifschitz as saying (in Ha'olam Hazeh, 22 August 1990, reprinted in Moledet, No. 24 (October 1990):

A war against Iraq is a real (religious) duty. If it is possible to make provocation, we must carry this out immediately. Such a golden opportunity in a convenient international situation fall into our hand once every hundred years. . . No one will busy himself with the triviality of transfer which we will carry out in paralel to the same time. . . Who exactly will be interested in the fate of two million palestinians, who supported the butcher of Baghdad and are settled on the lands of the little king (King Hussein)?'(p. 184)

And Masalha summarizes:

'The gist of Lifschitz's argument is that war against Iraq should be provoked if only so it could be utilised for the forcible mass expulsion of the Palestinians.'(p. 185)

One more spokesman for 'mass transfer' of the Palestinians, both inside 1948 Israel and in the Occupied Territories must be mentioned here: successive books, speeches, and political movements by Ora Shem-Ur, a prolific Polish-born Israeli journalist, promotes a concept of 'Greater Israel' which includes all the lands of biblical promise, from the Nile to the Euphrates, and naturallly therefore extends to Damascus and Palmyra. Her views are not some top-secret whispering campaign, but have been trumpeted for the last two decades in books like Israel: a Conditional State (1978) translated to English and published in New York in 1980 as The Challenges of Israel, and Greater Israel which came out in 1985 and was reprinted in 1988. Shem-Ur is quoted by Masalha as saying 'I pin great hopes on (Ariel Sharon) because when the time comes he is the man who is likely to carry out this plan very efficiently.'(p. 193)

Our detractors of Campus Watch like to pretend that those of us who see another catastrophe looming for the Palestinians at the hands of the Zionist state are victims of delusion prone to conspiracy theories. Only a provincial American audience whose world view has been made 'a-historic', could be persuaded by such dismissals. As I have argued elsewhere, the colonial settler state is intrinsically genocidal, and Nur Masalha's book is another important piece of the mosaic.